Train Wreck, Dramatic Style

Here it is, getting well on into the eleventh year of the twenty-first century, a number of disasters still raw on the face of the earth.  You think of New Orleans, still hurting and needful; Haiti, crying out in unheard agony; Pakistan immersed, soggy, miserable; the seeping wound in the Gulf of Mexico only just staunched but on this very day a new explosion of a rig.  No wonder an expression much in use is train wreck.  With ample pictures of train wrecks at our disposal we extend the metaphor to include any performance that did not go as planned, resulting in some disaster of language, performance, even intentions.  A train wreck has become short hand for Robert Burns' suggestion that "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft agley/An' leave us nought but grief an' pain/For promised joy..."

You have found unfortunate ways to extend the metaphor, the first of which is in things you read as a reader reading for enjoyment (might need an entire essay on what that has come to mean) or in order to provide editorial support, the other being disasters in your own work, accordion-pleated logic or detail strewn about after having collided with unnecessary description or the heavy hand of authorial intervention.

One of the great causes of literary train wreck is convenience, as in an event coming about in fortunate coincidence so that the star-crossed lovers meet or the grudging rivals meet or someone changes his or her mind in order to allow the story to arrive at some comfortable destination.  Perhaps as well a conversation between two or more characters in which vital information is FedExed to the reader, no signature required.  Hi, John, I've been meaning to talk to you about that business from last week.  You mean the one where we agreed to enter into an unlawful conspiracy against Fred?  No, although that was interesting and we might want to finalize that next week.  I mean the one where we both decided to raise prices we used to charge our clients.  Oh, that one.  Yes, that one.

Another cause is unnecessary description of any noun having the misfortune to appear in the story.  It can be the shape and/or color of the beard on the face of a homeless person the protagonist sees on his way to work every day, or a recitation of the exact number of steps a character requires to get from her desk at work to the photocopying machine in the work room, neither object, the beard or the photocopying machine having role or relevance in the story other than a demonstration of the character's acute awareness of quotidian details, thus demonstrating the sensitivity and regard for order experienced by said character.

Yet another train wreck may be an explanation, offered either by one of the characters to another, which is preferred over the explanation offered by the author, either an eighteenth-century author such as Henry Fielding (of Tom Jones fame) or the twentieth-century author Aldous Huxley, who so enjoyed explanations and descriptions that he became quite good at slipping them in between the more active paragraphs of his longer works and was no slouch at using them in short stories.

The more you think about the potential for train wrecks in the context of writing the more you become convinced that thought is a dangerous enterprise to indulge until you have completed at least an early draft of what you consider the work to be.  Even then you want more to listen to the material than think what you wish it to be.  If you listen carefully, you will learn what it wishes to be rather than the train wreck of what you think it ought to be.  Many promising dramatic ventures are spoiled by sending story and thought along the same track

Voice

Voice is the personality your prose transmits to the reader; it encapsulates and flavors your attitude to the subject, the characters you cast in your stories, and the types and intensity of the situations you are portraying.

Without this inherent attitude, your prose could not hope to carry an effect beyond the simple meaning of the particular words in particular sentences.   Look. Look. Look.  See Dick.  See Jane.  See Dick and Jane run and split infinitives.  With such nuance as cynicism, skepticism, doubt, and mockery enter the stage wearing their dancing shoes, lifting their tropes as though they were ballerinas.

Voice determines your choice of characters, situations, and outcome, allowing the possibility to explore the parallels you encounter in two or more seemingly divergent points of view, noting with exquisite precision and irony the point at which their agendas part company.

In general, it you were to take on high-mindedness, you would chose individuals from professions, positions of entitlement, or intellectuals.  By degree and design, you would challenge such individuals with problems bearing some moral consequence that would break, tempt, or bewilder them, relying on the subtext to somehow issue a true bill of indictment against them.  The result would be your disclosure, commensurate with the thrust of your voice; it would be your dramatic exposure of "them."

Each of this triad--character, situation, and outcome--are in effect armatures about which you wrap the details of their doing, mindful as you wrap that their doing may also be their undoing.  And quite possibly your own.  What better way to change your mind or position or taste than to write your way into it or out of it?

Novels & Short Stories: Some Assembly May Be Required

The recent arrival of a  bookshelf ordered on line brought untold resolutions to never again order anything sold with the designation:  Some assembly required.

Such items may well not be a challenge for those who score "high manual skills" on aptitude tests, but they are no friend to you.  In fact, had you been born into the Ice Age, or even the Stone or Bronze Ages, a so-called cave person, you would have been screwed, perhaps even fucked.  "Sorry,"  the leader of the hunting clan would have said, "We were hoping for someone with greater toolmaking and butchering skills.  Perhaps even the ability to throw a spear with accuracy at a considerable distance, woolly mammoths being what they are."

You were able, after some frustrations, able to assemble the bookcase to the point where it holds books without wobbling or sagging, bringing you to the awareness that the next time you see the designation "some assembly required," you will also look for a warning that some swearing may be required.

This is not mere hyperbole.  You often order stories and have recently accepted delivery on a novel.  Assembly is definitely called for in both.  So is swearing.  So it should be.  To get a short story or novel to stand without wobbling or sagging, you need skills of dramatic carpentry and design, true enough, but to get these bits of literary furniture to hold feelings, themes, zeitgeists, this requires the swearing born of anxiety, concern, faith, and a reach across some chasm that separates the known and familiar from the mysterious and transformative.

You would be properly suspicious were any short story or novel assembled by you to emerge in perfect plumb without some swearing or expression of dismay along the process, nor would the occasional kick in the shelves be amiss.  The simple truth is:  There are no instructions for this sort of thing; you must begin afresh each time, as though you faced an impenetrable learning curve, goaded by an equally inextinguishable urge to see the new project through to its wobbly, sagging emergence into the world,  whereupon you would need with some haste to create a shim which could give it greater stability in the eyes of those who would chance to lean upon it.

On the Road

You feed Sally a generous breakfast because she has lost some weight and because you might not be seeing her for a few days.  Then you load her into the car and start down the PCH toward LA, taking a route she has taken with you for a number of years.  Little does she know what awaits her.  You are barely punctual for a ten o'clock appointment at the office of the man who was the instructor in veterinary school of your present vet.

Sally is logged into the bureaucracy.  The Brentwood Pet Hospital is like an episode of ER but no George Clooney, rather a cadre of Goldens, a Whippet with front legs in a cast, a frizzy poodle and an amiable pound dog, short hair looking like a mix of hound and boxer.  The doctor is only half an hour late and this was because another doctor was using the ultrasound device.  He spends some time feeling about Sally's throat, grimacing with what you try not to interpret as truly bad news as in inoperable bad news as in unable to remove the afflicted thyroid which has been diagnosed as nodular with high probability the nodules are malignant.

A bit more than an hour later,he returns Sally to you, a patch of hair having been shaved below her chin.  The tumors have been scanned and emerge sufficiently lacking in the density associated with cancerous behavior.  Besides, both aspects of her thyroid have nodules at the same place; unlikely behavior for cancerous tumor.  Sally's chart is off to an endocrinologist and Sally is back up the coast to Santa Barbara, with the attitude of one who knew all along that this was no big deal.

The vet's grimace turns out to have been his skeptical look, the look of not trusting a diagnosis and wanting further verification.

Your own expression was much other than skeptical, rather jubilant.  You'd thought the proper course would have been removal of both her thyroids to prevent cancer from metastasizing and spreading through her body as cancer cells are likely to do, an act that would have put her through a rough week and then a life time of needing to take thyroid pills, just as Mary Conrad needs to take them or, for that matter, a former student, Donna Barnett.

Sally knocks off a hamburger patty and one of the two sausage links that came with your brunch.  You both burp happily northward up the Pacific Coast Highway.  You experience the pure effervescent joy of knowing a dear friend is out of harm's way, of a chaotic universe with a moment of respite and enthusiasm.  Your friend dozes while you drive, hearing a lively music of the spheres, the sounds of a world where for a moment all is well.  You are reminded of the tail end of the motion picture, The Lion in Winter, where Peter O'Toole as Henry II of England sets Katherine Hepburn as his estranged wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, off in the bark that will take her back to the castle where she is more or less under house arrest.  He waves fondly after her.  "Sometimes," he calls after her, "I think we'll live forever."

As you approach Deer Creek, one of Sally's favorite gamboling and sniffing places with a stunning, hundred-eighty-degree view of the coast, you call to her in the hatchback platform where she is now coming alert.  "Let's live for ever, kiddo, and write the hell out of things."

The expression on her face suggests she is nodding.  She is really taking in the rich smells of chaparral, sea iodine, and the animal population of the canyon:  coyotes, bobcats, birds, rodents, squirrels.  Maybe, she seems to be saying, fifty-fifty.  Write the hell out of things and spend some time in places like this.  Deal?

Deal.

Interest

What makes a story interesting?

You ask because of a recent brush with boredom, which caused you to define your awareness of the way the major feeling associated with that unfortunate state is the sense of being alarmingly disinterested while at the same time being trapped within a situation from which there is no immediate retreat.

At such times when you were finally freed of a bout of boredom, it seemed to you that everything about you, the merest hint of a flower or tree or dog or cloud carried sensual transportation to a happier state.

Disinterest and trapped are both conditions wanting some greater specificity as a means of conveying the helplessness and of unseen walls moving in on your living and breathing space.  Disinterest conveys a state where no persons or creatures or matter are close enough to hand for which to display some concern or connection.  Disinterest, a cousin once removed from boredom, is the awareness of being surrounded by facts, random information, persons, materials, utensils, and art of little or no consequence for you.  You utterly lack the conditions necessary to care about any of them.  Trapped means there is no apparent exit, no escape hatch through which you may flee, heaving sighs of relief, taking in gulps of celebratory air.  You are stuck where you are and in the situation you are in for a period of time that by its very nature will seem longer in the experience of it as it weighs in upon you that its actual duration.  Thus boredom begins to approximate being without agreeable sense stimuli for a period in which time is ductile, capable of being drawn out to its extreme limits.

So you have ventured toward definition of interest via the negative route by which you defined what it lacks.  Radiant stimuli, landing on your thirsty receptors, provide the beginnings of interest.  All persons, places, and things emit vibrations; those with whom you feel in some form of connection evoke a response in you of recognition, familiarity, intrigue, and perhaps even a touch of mystery.  These qualities urge you forth into that delightful state of being interested, of caring, of in ways you scarcely understand urge you to open your receptors further, taking in the powers about you to the point where you respond by sending out responses of your own, which have their effect or not on the persons, places, and things of interest to you.

Interest may be a wide avenue or a back alley.  It may be mutual or of no consequence, adding to the two qualities that so constantly reside in story--suspense and curiosity.  Take any two persons performing the same activity, say reading a book.  One interests you to the point where you begin creating a pearl in your imagination.  The other does not send forth body language or vibrations or aura or any kind of psychic radar that cause you to register that person's engaging details.

A day without interest of any sort is intolerable, an hour without it is boredom, the exit from which is the ingenuity of your imagination.

A Writer's Guide to Boredom

If the book you are reading begins to displease you, you can skip ahead, hopeful of finding a more engaging foothold, or you can set the book aside, never to return.  If a film you are watching in a theater begins to turn your sensitivities as though you had eaten the wrong taco at the wrong restaurant, you can get up and leave.  Similarly you can switch the channel on your TV, seek another CD for a more enjoyable musical experience, bail out of a play or lecture at an intermission, toss a magazine aside or even not renew your subscription when renewal time comes about.  You could, if you were a student, drop a class when it became apparent to you that the instructor was monotonous in presentation or brought a particular bias to the presentation that caused you to wait for another instructor to act as your guide.

These ventures all have the common thread of an escape hatch.  You are escaping from disinterest or lack of engagement.  You are escaping from boredom.  By extrapolation, boredom is the product of circumstances that force you to remain in the vicinity of an exposure to dramatic, statistical, or artistic material that by its very nature causes you to wish to avoid.  Boredom is being trapped in a situation where you are being presented with some form of information you wish no exposure to.

The presentiment of boredom arrives with an ominous cadence of inner responses being triggered in you, causing you to estimate a level at which your tolerance will erupt.  Boredom is the realization that you must endure even more information you do not wish to inflict on your sensory receptors.  If, you tell yourself, I have to read one more page, hear one more sentence, endure one more scene, I will do something that allows me to expel the pent-up resentment that has been building within me.

You would think that a writer would use the process of writing to construct dramatic situations that cause the exact opposite of boredom, which is to say empathy, involvement, concern, care.  You would think that one of the writer's earliest motivations was to create emotional and imaginary landscapes he or she was unable to find anywhere else and thus satisfy an inner craving for transportation away from the drabness of the quotidian and into the excited tingle of another world.  You would think so and in an approach that has still not entirely given way to skepticism or cynicism, you approach new books with the belief that they are tickets to another universe, a fraught universe, a universe that causes your skin to tingle, your mind to roar with anticipation, your feelings to perform arpeggios and glissandos on your spinal column.

But we are of course not all tuned to the same responsive key nor do we have interests shared by great swaths of humankind.  Your interests can and do bore others, which has made you aware of the great tool of voicing by which it becomes possible to interest individuals with the information you are eager to provide rather than bore or distract them.

Spending time in a condition of boredom is a humbling experience for a writer, one possibly lost in the sheer exuberance of escaping the atmosphere of boredom.  Your own biggest fear is that of boring those you wish for some reason or complexity or reasons to interest.   The sense that you are boring such an individual is worse than a hundred rejection slips because you have become alert to the multiplicity of reasons for the rejection slip that have nothing to do with boredom.

It becomes so easy to generalize:  The key to effective storytelling is to begin with an irresistible sentence, followed by another, and then another, after which you will have built sufficient momentum to cause whoever shall read them to urge you to continue.  At this point you will have experienced the seeming magic of power by putting into play the great dramatic maxim, "Never take the reader where the reader wants to go."  Yeah, right.

Well, actually, it is right.  Withhold.  When you present the reader with more information and/or philosophy than the reader wants to know, you have brought them right back to the point at hand, which is to say you have put them not in care's way or harm's way but in the way of boredom.

Fish as Metaphor and Reality

Sometimes as a youngster, you tried your hand at fishing.  The results were often more frustrating than the satisfying fishing stories so many of your friends tell, but if only in metaphor, you did catch something every bit as meaningful to you than the fish you did not catch.

Because it had never occurred to you to investigate fishing, your memory bites onto the tempting bait of your father, appearing before you, revealing to you with the same sense of importance as a rabbi unrolling a Torah, a display of small hooks.  "With these,"  he said, "You will be able to catch fish--" his hands spread to a remarkable width,"--this long.  First, you will need a line."  From is pocket he drew a tidy skein, black and shiny, radiant with the implication of tensile strength.  "And of course, something to attract the fish."  You were then led to the back yard, where a patch of sunburned grass awaited under a clothesline holder that reminded you of a saguaro cactus.  Your father, who was always gifted at producing things, showed you a shovel with which, in a single scoop of the earth under the clothesline, unearthed a clutch of worms. "Fish,"  he said, "are attracted to worms."

Your mother, who wanted no truck with worms, informed you that fish may also be attracted to tiny pieces of hamburger, chunks of bread, even pellets of peanut butter, none of which she had scruples about handling.

The early venues for your fishing expeditions were invariably what was called Westlake Park, now called MacArthur Park, in the lower reaches of Wilshire Boulevard in midtown Los Angeles.  There were indeed fish there, and beyond your ken of sensitivity, you spent considerable time there because, just across the street, were the offices of an eye surgeon-opthamologist whose patient you were in hopes of correcting a strabismus.  Although many fish were attracted to the various bait you set out for them (including worms you did not tell your mother about), none of them were motivated to fulfill your father's predictions.

Some years later, your fishing expeditions extended to the Santa Monica Pier at the far western extreme of Wilshire Boulevard, where you actually caught a fish or two but really learned how to fish by yelling obscenities at the fishermen on the incoming boats, provoking them to throw fish at you.

A hook in time became a word.  The line became a sentence.  The bait became, gradually an ironic statement and then, later still, what a character wanted, what a character dreamed of, or a character being forced to make a decision.

As you became more deeply involved with publishing, your fishing expeditions tended to be overtly social, arranged by printers and manufacturers and paper companies for their clients.  Thus your first experience with waders and a spinning reel which was guaranteed to bring forth rainbow and brown trout found you at the crack of sunrise, badly hung over, in the cold waters of eastern Tennessee, wondering about your balance.  Hush puppies and trout sauteed in bacon grease are, you discovered, excellent anodynes to the common hangover.  Ventures of a similar nature were repeated--sans hangover--off the coastlines of northern and central California, all of them having to do more with the social than the fishing.

Thus it is the metaphor of fishing rather than the act of fishing that attracts you.  He who is probably your closest friend, Barnaby Conrad, gets a gleam in his eye when you mention woolly buggers and other of the so-called dry fly fishing lures.  He is a catch-and-release man and although he has in fact written thirty-seven books, soon to be thirty-nine, he has no need to see a metaphor so much as the activity itself.  In the larger sense, this is true.  There is action and there is metaphor.  Action may become metaphor, but metaphor rarely becomes action.  Writing is about action, and even though Mr. Conrad is a catch-and-release man, he is not at all adverse to a trout fillet or two for breakfast of a late summer's morning after being out in the river with his four-beat cast and his instincts honed for where the big ones may be lurking, just below the surface.